There may be instances when you need to disable Desktop Effects (Compiz Fusion) temporarily in openSUSE. A best example, is when I enabled “Reflection” plugin, my screen hung with blank grey windows, reboot didn’t help as the reflection plugin was still in action and Intel 965 GM don’t very well support this effect.

To disable Desktop Effects temporarily,

Press <ALT> + F2 and type “metacity — replace”

This should let compiz to start but disables later on. This will replace metacity as the new Window Manager.